The Old Guide: Interview 1978

In 1871, my great-grandparents, Joseph Jalbert and Helen Russell Jalbert, settled a 160-acre farm in a frontier settlement three miles above Allagash Falls, in the area now called, Michaud Farm. Susan Russell McClellan, wife of Finley McClellan, gave a portion of her and her husband's land to the newly married couple.

My grandfather, Willard Jalbert, Sr., was born on the farm in 1887. Working as farmer, tow-boat operator, lumberjack, river driver, trapper and guide, he always found a way to keep from leaving the spirit of a wilderness river that ran through his blood.

"Your grandfather's love of the Allagash," Jim Connors, an old river driver, once told me, "is what kept him poor."

Click here to read the [Interview].(https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ULCbSvY94m0X2fnRsLfCQh7m32zmJuWG/view?usp=sharing)

The Old Guide's childhood swung from triumph to tragedy.

As boys, he and his brothers flew up a snow-packed tote road in a sleigh harnessed to a young bull moose.

At five years old, May 3, 1892, he and eleven siblings gathered around their mother's bed as she lay dying. The next day, his older siblings carried her body enshrouded in a bedsheet down to a dugout canoe. The family buried Helen in the St. Francis Catholic cemetery.

As a teenager on a log drive run by his older brother, "Wild Joe," the Old Guice stood on a log and ran the Long Lake Dam sluiceway -- a fourteen-foot drop -- without losing the felt hat he waved to his brother and river drivers eating lunch on the bank.

In the summer, he guided trout fishermen from a combined abandoned logging camp and tent camp on Round Pond. That site has been designated the Outlet Campsite. In the late-1930s, he moved his operation to Windy Point, where north and south winds drove away black flies.

In 1946, when his sons, Willard Jr. and Robert, returned from a world war, they built him a fishing and hunting lodge on Windy Point: Jalberts Allagash Camps.

A Great Northern Paper Company representative flew by bush plane into Round Pond to drive the Jalberts off company land—-in the early-1940s, a representative had succeeded in driving him off Windy Point, back to the black-fly invested abandoned logging camp at what is now the Outlet Campsite.

This time, the brothers backed the representative into a clothesline that held him like a snare."Burn these camps," my father growled, swinging his arm to include vast timber holdings of high-value spruce and fir, "and you'll never put out the fire."

A few days later, a ninety-nine-year lease appeared in their mother's Fort Kent mailbox.

From a landing at Allagash Village, the three men ferried thirty miles upriver by twenty-foot canoe and outboard motor, including a half-mile portage around Allagash Falls, lumber, spikes, doors, windows, woodstoves, propane refrigerators, propane cookstoves...everything to outfit a lodge deep in the wild.

In the late-1940s, they began construction of a hunting camps halfway between the falls and Round Pond. They called it Halfway Camp. Seven miles upriver from Round Pond, they built the Whitaker Brook camp. This time timber companies gave them a lease without question.

C'est comme ça how we roll.